Thick as Thieves

Loved this exchange between Charles Colville and Bob Willis on Sky, Sunday evening, during which Colville went way up in my estimation. Admittedly it's all rather relative though...

To set the scene, they’d just shown highlights of Sehwag's blitz, which for a time seemed to be a three second clip of his cutting a long hop to the cover point boundary on a permanent loop. Cutting back to the studio, there were all the usual platitudes about what a wonderful innings it had been – then Chas posed the big question -

Why were Anderson and Harmison continually feeding Sehwag’s cut shot and, more importantly, why didn’t they adjust their line?

Willis’s response totally ignored the question and was the predictable Sybil Fawlty ‘ooh, I know Charles’ act, with some flannel thrown in about them used to having batsmen let those sort of deliveries go by rather than thrashing them into a different postal district.

This is when it got interesting, for Colville stood his ground and wouldn’t let the Mad Aunt fob him off. 'That’s not what I said. Why did they pitch it wide and short? Shouldn’t they be able to adjust?'

Back came Sybil Willis again – ‘Ooh I know Charles, maybe they should have put Flintoff on, he’s the master at getting the ball right up in the block hole and cramping the batsman’

Fair play to Colville here. By the stage most of us would have had Willis by the throat, screamingly ‘answer the f****** question for f**** sake!!’ but Colville kept his cool and came back with a slightly acerbic but pointed 'Flintoff can’t bowl both ends, why can’t anyone else bowl like that?’

Willis was obviously flummoxed by this so, to avoid complaints from the RSPCA, Colville moved on to matters less taxing.